Grab a little bite

Here's something I found through Dark Roasted Blend, which I'm not sure is an active site anymore but at least hasn't been taken down. It's miniature food, like for example four tacos that can fit on a quarter. Someone named Jessica Hlavac is responsible for this. I know pretty much nothing about her. Another site says that the foods aren't edible, but I have to credit Hlavac with getting the textures of foods down pat. 

Coming to a dollhouse near you? Maybe.

An idea whose tine has come

 

The world's second-largest fork resides in Springfield, Missouri. No idea what you'd eat with it. But I have to like it. There's no profound message to it. They just liked the idea of having a huge fork in the middle of town. They didn't give up on it when the restaurant it was part of went under. And they weren't discouraged when a city in Oregon built an even taller fork. Which I'm sure is quite a story in its own right.

No frillzzzzzzzz

Over the last couple of nights, I've watched the first two episodes of the two-season Falling Water, a large number of onetime USA Network shows being available for free on Amazon Prime. Despite a good cast and some visual flair, it's mostly boring pretentious nonsense. But it did get me thinking on my own.

The show is about...well, the fact that I still don't know how to finish that sentence is a big part of the problem. But there's a thread about sleep experiments and a lot of philosophizing about how we could all be connected through dreams.

The writers―like most people, I think―misunderstand what makes dreams interesting. Dreams are weird, yes. But there's no effort to make them weird. They're not scripted to take you really far out. On the contrary, they're almost always skeletal. Their interest comes from their careless minimalism.

A few weeks ago I dreamed that I was in this big dark theatre. Afterwards I was riding on some open-air streetcar through the countryside. How did I get from the theatre to the streetcar running on tracks where there is no street? I have no idea. My brain skipped over that segue. 

The odd things you remember from having to get up and pee.

Cinderblock gothic

Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" is somewhat bittersweet. It's about kids huddled on Venus who only get to play outside one day per year, and the kind of behavior this ultimately provokes in them. Bradbury wrote it when Venus was thought to be gloomy and probably uninhabited, but before we found out that it was completely inimical to life. (Named after the goddess of love. Scores of poets are laughing in the great beyond.)

The short film above is billed as an adaptation. Literally it is no such thing. How can it be? There's no cast, and two minutes isn't long enough to tell the tale. Still, it does take advantage of the fact that even the most sterile and featureless environments can evoke a mood. Consciousness abhors a vacuum.

Let it Sno

The heads in this piece do have a certain bleak grandeur. They have expressive faces while remaining big rocks, thanks to their sculptor. The influence of the Moai can't really be missed. 

Incidentally, when I first read the header "Georgia's Easter Island" I thought it might be the other Georgia. Southern folk art has produced some wondrous things. But the Eurasian Georgia is quite interesting too. In modern times it might best be known as the home of Josef Stalin, who much preferred to speak Russian, although he did speak Georgian to his mother. (Everybody has a soft spot, I guess.) It was also on the Eastern edges of the Roman Empire, although it doesn't seem Romanized in most respects.

Strange attractor

As Germany prepares to ease off its lockdown it tickles me to think of the urban explorers around Berlin who now have the chance to take a jaunt to Spreepark PlanterWald, an amusement park that opened in 1969 and went out of business early in this century. Amusement parks tend to have sights that are odd objectively, but attendees just take them for granted as they have fun and/or try to remember where they parked. But seeing a huge model dinosaur with no head or a teacup ride with a thick coat of dust brings it home again.

Nearby Treptower Park houses the Archenhold Sternwarte observatory, which houses the world's longest 21m reflecting telescope. The author of the DRB article describes it as "look(ing) like a surreal gun pointed into the sky from the building."

Um, yeah. That's one thing you could say it looks like.

What you see

The Thematic apperception test is an odd one all right. Unlike the Rorschach test, it asks subjects to interpret objective, identifiable images.Those images were taken from illustrated magazines of the 1930s. That means that as time has gone on they've become somewhat more archaic.

And ripped out of context, they're fairly eerie in the first place. The one above could be interpreted as vampirism, resurrection, haunting, or just the guy on the bed having a very vivid dream. Among other possibilities.

None of which is to say this test can't work. In fact, the open-ended nature of the test could allow patients to access a more creative side than usually comes out.

I'm the wind, baby

The Carileon, by Sebastien Leon // Performed by Loup Barrow and the wind from Studio Sebastien Leon on Vimeo.

A percussionist is rather spoiled for choice in terms of things to strike. Nice problem to have. In addition there are sounds being made by the wind. It's kind of soothing.

Paranoia fuel

Outland from Mystery Flavor Collective on Vimeo.

That's a TV Tropes-ism of course, but it fits this mixture of claymation and live action, the impression I get from it. Despite the absurdity of the ending, or maybe enhanced by it.

Outside we're having a cleansing storm, flooding in the gutters. Wonder if that has anything to do with my reaction.

Side mind

Lateral thinking, by definition, uses creative reasoning to solve a problem or mystery. So really, while some answers may be righter than others, there might not be a single right answer. It's best to approach these problems in a spirit of curiosity.

The introduction to these exercises says that they tend to be morbid. Which is true. Some of them sounded so much like depressing and quotidian police blotter items I had trouble figuring out what the mystery was supposed to be. A handful I managed to figure out the suggested answer. Some I liked my solution better, although in a few cases I fell short of finding anything that worked. And on the second page I swear there's one where the solution is a Tom Waits song.

Big and little

This short is by an artist who specializes in sculpture installations that play with visual perspective. Like, if two people are in one of her pieces and you look at them from the outsize, one will look like a giant compared to the other even if they're both the same size. So that seems to be a productive area of thought for her.

I like this dreamy little film. The end feels like it should have Sousa's "Liberty Bell March" playing over it.

It's time to dress up right

Did you know that Paul Klee made puppets? If I ever heard anything about it, I must have forgotten. Which is a shame. The brilliant thing about this is that these look like the kind of puppets children could spend hours watching or playing with. They are that kind of simple puppet. But there's a little bit of dark expressionism that doesn't dilute the playfulness, or vice versa.

Nothing wrong with his paintings on their own, but the puppeting adds a new dimension to my image of the man.

PB&J

While the Punch and Judy show has roots in the Italian commedia dell'arte, where the traditional figure of Pulcinello first appeared, it's in practice one of those irreducibly British cultural practices. I kind of have a feeling that this was one of those things I tried talking to my friends about when I was a kid and pretty much got blank stares. I'm not British but I sort of had that background, and they didn't.

Notice that in this instance the puppeteer uses his natural, very masculine voice for Judy. This could be either to downplay the domestic violence which is surely in the offing or just to give his own larynx a break.

But the dealer just stares...

The Clash's epic song "The Card Cheat" impresses me more and more as time goes by. At the time they recorded it I'm sure no one was expecting them to venture so far into Elton John territory, to the extent that doing so posed a real risk.

I've never considered the possibility of having stuffed animals act out the lyrics. It's a memorable effect. Kind of reminds me of Stepan Chapman's "Revenge of the Calico Cat".

What was that?

Reading most arts coverage in print or online nowadays tends to further give the impression that we're living in a monoculture and no one's really trying to be different. One longs for a story about someone committing to a really nutty idea. Well, here's one.

Can an opera work when, for the most part, you can't hear what people are singing? It's an interesting idea. Kind of the ultimate in "less is more." Difficult if not impossible to replicate electronically, which is why I didn't bother embedding a video. There is video about this piece, which workshopped in Chicago a few years ago, but it's just people talking about it.

This is the classic kind of idea where people visiting New York will take in a show and leave shaking their heads, going "I just don't get it." Of course they'd be relatively affluent and there's a good chance the actors and musicians are commuting from New Jersey and/or crashing at the Y. That's the 2018 angle.

The time I like is the rush hour, cos I like the rush

As you might guess, the video above is not a true video. Rather it's made up of almost 1,000 photos taken by 38 pinhole matchbox cameras. Depicted is a busy street in Belem, Brazil. constructing this narrative out of still photos is an amazing feat, and I get a feel for the social rhythm of the city as well. Also, drums!

Daxo-gold

Submitted for your approval... The daxophone. A tuned slab of wood, it can look like a wooden bat'leth sword you'd use in a middle school play about Klingons. When bowed, it sounds alternately like a whale, Chewbacca, and a baritone sax. And it's the primary instrument on this track. Which I'm not positive I love, but it does gain points for uniqueness.

Whirrrrrr

Kneip 2015 - Objects of Curiosity from stiankorntvedruud on Vimeo.

These little motorized sculptures seem strangely haunted. In truth, while I couldn't tell you exactly how all this was done, they seem to be powered by magnets and very simple electric generators. So on some level the tech may have been accessible to people of the nineteenth century. The ideas are contemporary, though.

The thing that seemed to be taking flight like a bat was very interesting.

Now they call me Three Finger Joe

Get a load of this when you have the time. It's a little over twenty minutes.

I saw it earlier in the eventing at a live broadcast of Rifftrax, one where they brought back a lot of old MST3K people, including Joel a couple of times.

Anyway, this safety film is a rich target being the three G's: goofy, gory, and grim. But it's kind of artful as well. The shots are well centered. The guy playing the foreman, at least, is a natural. As it turns out the film was made by Herk Harvey, the director of the cult classic Carnival of Souls. Which makes you wonder about the metaphysics of this construction site.

50 ways to love your lever

Rube Goldberg machine by vegasbuzzvideo

Last year I slept under an Andy Warhol calendar. This year it's Rube Goldberg. I've gone from the future where everyone's famous for fifteen minutes to one where everyone's a brilliant inventor for a like amount of time.

These kinds of things wow you not just if they do what they're supposed to do, but if all the parts move in conjunction in the first place.